Hacker News Reader

Comment by jokoon | Hacker News Reader

I'm still wondering why webassembly is not used more. I did not discover helloworlds tutorials, how to call js from WASM and vice versa... I sense WASM is still a little fastidious?

I would love to have python released as a python WASM blob, there's pyiodine but it's not just python.

I thought I would see more libraries compiled to WASM but it doesn't seem to be the case. I want to guess the c/c++ toolchains are lacking support and usage, or maybe C/C++ devs don't care about WASM? I know I do.

WASM lets non-web-developers run their code in a browser, but web developers don't really care since they prefer writing JS. Maybe that's why WASM is not taking off. That's a shame.

View on HN

> I'm still wondering why webassembly is not used more

Largely because the majority of the problems that I have as a web developer are not solved by manipulating 32/64-bit ints/floats at native speeds.

While I'm sure there are many exceptional uses for wasm that are related to computational pipelines, machine learning, and canvas rendering none of that really helps me add a text node to a DOM element that let's my user know they entered an invalid username/password combination.

>> I'm still wondering why webassembly is not used more.

Because it doesn't support direct DOM access(thus is slower than JS and more mem hungry) and lacks GC so many languages (i.e php, ruby, python etc) don't run (at all or just not efficiently) in the browser.

There's not a lot of good reasons to use WebAssembly for most apps. You need code that is performance critical with light IO/DOM access, and can be written in the handful of languages that can be practically compiled to WASM, i.e. not just porting the runtime to WASM. Fact of the matter is that JS has evolved to be the best language for most front end development tasks. It's scriptable, somewhat performant due to JITs, quite good for single threaded async reactive programming and actually can be written in a nice pseudo-functional manner. And the libraries are quite good, even if NPM gets some hate.

WASM doesn’t have access to the DOM which really limits use cases.

I believe that its actually possible to run python in WASM, see https://wapm.io/package/python#shell

Reply on news.ycombinator.com